Evans, David K.

Person:
Evans, David K.

Africa Chief Economist’s Office

Fields of Specialization

Education, Social Development

ORCID

0000-0001-5413-9284

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Africa Chief Economist’s Office

Last updated: February 27, 2025

Biography

Bio: David is a Lead Economist in the Chief Economist's Office for the Africa Region of the World Bank. He coordinates impact evaluation work across sectors for the Africa Region. In the past, he worked as Senior Economist in the Human Development Department in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region of the World Bank, and as an economist designing and implementing impact evaluations in Africa. He has designed and implemented impact evaluations in agriculture, education, health, and social protection, in Brazil, the Gambia, Kenya, Mexico, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. He has taught economic development at the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and he holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 42

Does Free Sound Too Cheap? The Adverse Effect of a Randomized Text Message Campaign on Program Take-up
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-12) Annan, Jeannie; Koussoubé, Estelle; Tassy, Joséphine; Rouanet, Léa; Delavallade, Clara; Evans, David K.
This study conducted a randomized experiment to improve participation in a youth employment program in Côte d'Ivoire by testing text message outreach methods. Sending text messages highlighting that the program was free only to eligible youth had no impact, but messages sent to both youth and trusted contacts led to reduced enrollment. This negative effect was smaller for women, and 0 when their contact was also female. Qualitative findings suggest that distrust among unfamiliar contacts contributed to this decline. The study highlights the importance of tailoring communication strategies in job training programs to increase effectiveness, considering recipients’ relationships and trust.
Property Tax Compliance in Tanzania: Can Nudges Help?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-08) Collin, Matthew Edward; Di Maro, Vincenzo; Evans, David K.; Manang, Frederik
Low tax compliance in low- and middle-income countries around the world limits the ability of governments to offer effective public services. This paper reports the results of a randomly rolled out text message campaign aimed at promoting tax compliance among landowners in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Landowners were randomly assigned to one of four groups designed to test different aspects of tax morale. They received a simple text message reminder to pay their tax (a test of salience), a message highlighting the connection between taxes and public services (reciprocity), a message communicating that people who did not pay were not contributing to local or national development (social pressure), or no message (control). Recipients of any message were 18 percent (or 2 percentage points) more likely to pay any property tax by the end of the study period. Each type of message resulted in gains in payment rates, although social pressure messages delivered the lowest gains. Total payment amounts were highest for those who received reciprocity messages. Nudges were most effective in areas with lower initial rates of tax compliance. The average estimated benefit-cost ratio across treatments is 36:1 due to the low cost of the intervention, with higher cost-effectiveness for reciprocity messages.
Cash Transfers, Trust, and Inter-household Transfers: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-01-24) Evans, David K.; Kosec, Katrina
Institutionalized conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs may affect pre-existing, informal safety nets such as inter-household transfers and trust among community members. This study reports on a randomized controlled trial used to test the impact of CCTs on various measures of trust and informal safety nets within communities in Tanzania. It provides evidence that the introduction of a CCT program increased program beneficiaries’ trust in other community members and their perceived ability to access support from other households (e.g., childcare). Although CCTs reduced the total size of transfers to beneficiary households in the community in the short run (after 1.75 years of transfers), that reduction had disappeared 2.75 years after transfers began. Taken together, this evidence suggests that formal CCT programs do not necessarily crowd out informal safety nets in the longer term, and they may in fact boost trust and support across households.
How to Improve Education Outcomes Most Efficiently? A Comparison of 150 Interventions Using the New Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling Metric
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10) Angrist, Noam; Evans, David K.; Filmer, Deon; Glennerster, Rachel; Rogers, F. Halsey; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. Some studies report changes in years of schooling; others report changes in learning. Standard deviations, the metric typically used to report learning gains, measure gains relative to a local distribution of test scores. This metric makes it hard to judge if the gain is worth the cost in absolute terms. This paper proposes using learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) -- which combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard -- as a new metric for reporting gains from education interventions. The paper applies LAYS to compare the effectiveness (and cost-effectiveness, where cost is available) of interventions from 150 impact evaluations across 46 countries. The results show that some of the most cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality schooling (that is, schooling at quality comparable to the highest-performing education systems) for just $100 per child -- compared with zero years for other classes of interventions.
Building State Capacity: What Is the Impact of Development Projects?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12) Di Maro, Vincenzo; Evans, David K.; Khemani, Stuti; Scot, Thiago
Although research has established the importance of state capacity in economic development, less is known about how to build that capacity and the role of external partners in the process. This paper estimates the impact of a typical development project designed to build state capacity in a low-income country. Specifically, it evaluates a multilateral development bank project in Tanzania, which incentivized investments in local state capacity by offering grants conditional on institutional performance scores. The paper uses a difference-in-differences methodology to estimate the project impact, comparing outcomes between 18 project and 22 non-project local governments over 2016–18. Outcomes were measured through two rounds of primary surveys of nearly 500 local government officials and nearly 3,000 households. Over the course of the project, measured state capacity improved in project areas, but due to comparable gains in non-project areas, the project’s value-added to change in state capacity is estimated to be zero across all the dozens of relevant variables in the surveys. The data suggest that state capacity is evolving in Tanzania through endogenous changes in trust and legitimacy in the country rather than from financial incentives offered by external partners.
Teacher Professional Development around the World: The Gap between Evidence and Practice
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-06-04) Popova, Anna; Evans, David K.; Arancibia, Violeta; Breeding, Mary E.
Many teachers in low- and middle-income countries lack the skills to teach effectively, and professional development (PD) programs are the principal tool that governments use to upgrade those skills. At the same time, few PD programs are evaluated, and those that are evaluated show highly varying results. This paper proposes a set of indicators—the In-Service Teacher Training Survey Instrument—to standardize reporting on teacher PD programs. An application of the instrument to 33 rigorously evaluated PD programs shows that programs that link participation to career incentives, have a specific subject focus, incorporate lesson enactment in the training, and include initial face-to-face training tend to show higher student learning gains. In qualitative interviews, program implementers also report follow-up visits as among the most effective characteristics of their professional development programs. This paper then uses the instrument to present novel data on a sample of 139 government-funded, at-scale professional development programs across 14 countries. The attributes of most at-scale teacher professional development programs differ sharply from those of programs that evidence suggests are effective, with fewer incentives to participate in PD, fewer opportunities to practice new skills, and less follow-up once teachers return to their classrooms.
Economic and Social Development along the Urban-Rural Continuum: New Opportunities to Inform Policy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08) Cattaneo, Andrea; Adukia, Anjali; Brown, David L.; Christiaensen, Luc; Evans, David K.; Haakenstad, Annie; McMenomy, Theresa; Partridge, Mark; Vaz, Sara; Weiss, Daniel J.
The economic and social development of nations relies on their population having physical access to services and employment opportunities. For the vast majority of the 3.4 billion people living in rural locations, this largely depends on their access to urban centers of different sizes. Similarly, urban centers depend on their rural hinterlands. Building on the literature on functional areas/territories and the rural-urban continuum as well as insights from central place theory, this review paper advances the notion of catchment areas differentiated along an urban-to-rural continuum to capture these urban-rural interconnections. It further shows how a new, publicly available data set operationalizing this concept can shed new light on policy making across a series of development fields, including institutions and governance, urbanization and food systems, welfare and poverty, and access to health and education services. Together the insights support a more geographically nuanced perspective on development.
Education Technology for Effective Teachers
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-02-01) Evans, David K.
Education systems around the world are investing in technology to help teachers be more effective. In some cases, the results are exciting. In others, the impact of technology falls short of expectations or remains unevaluated. The closing of schools worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of understanding how to leverage technology well. This note lays out four principles for investing in technology for effective teachers and six aspects of teaching where technology can boost teacher performance, together with examples of tested, promising, and cautionary experiences with teacher technologies.
The Skills Balancing Act in Sub-Saharan Africa: Investing in Skills for Productivity, Inclusivity, and Adaptability
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Agence française de développement, 2019-06-10) Arias, Omar; Evans, David K.; Santos, Indhira; Arias, Omar
Sub-Saharan Africa has the youngest population of any region of the world, and that growing working-age population represents a major opportunity to reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity. But the region’s workforce is the least skilled in the world, constraining economic prospects. Despite economic growth, declining poverty, and investments in skills-building, too many students in too many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are not acquiring the foundational skills they need to thrive and prosper in an increasingly competitive global economy. This report examines the balancing act that individuals and countries face in making productive investments in both a wide range of skills – cognitive, socio-emotional, and technical – and a wide range of groups – young children through working adults – so that Sub-Saharan Africa will thrive.
What We Learn about Girls’ Education from Interventions That Do Not Focus on Girls
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-05-19) Yuan, Fei; Evans, David K.
What is the best way to improve access and learning outcomes for girls This review brings together evidence from 267 educational interventions in 54 low- and middle-income countries – regardless of whether the interventions specifically target girls – and identifies their impacts on girls. To improve access and learning, general interventions deliver average gains for girls that are comparable to girl-targeted interventions. General interventions have similar impacts for girls as for boys. Taken together, these findings suggest that many educational gains for girls may be achieved through nontargeted programs. Many of the most effective interventions to improve access for girls relax household-level constraints (such as cash transfer programs), and many of the most effective interventions to improve learning for girls involve improving the pedagogy of teachers. Girl-targeted interventions may make the most sense when addressing constraints that are unique to, or most pronounced for, girls.